Hybrid Cloud

Nutanix announced at its .NEXT Conference 2017 that the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS will be delivered as a full software stack with new multi-cloud capabilities in Nutanix Calm and a new cloud service called Nutanix Xi Cloud Services. The new offerings take a fresh approach to hybrid cloud, empowering customers to use Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Software throughout their multi-cloud deployments, including on-premises with platforms from IBM, Dell EMC, Lenovo, Cisco and HPE, in the cloud via AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure or natively with Nutanix Xi Cloud Services.

In the multi-cloud era, data and applications are dispersed not just across enterprise private and public clouds, but also distributed remote office/branch office (ROBO) and disaster recovery (DR) environments, as well as edge computing use cases. Today's enterprises want to build these diverse deployment options into their end-to-end cloud designs, without disjointed IT operations or lock-in to any one virtualization or cloud stack. A single software OS brings a new approach to unifying these multiple clouds - across the full compute, storage and network stack - which dramatically simplifies operations with common IT tooling, enabling application mobility across clouds, while remaining open to any hardware, hypervisor, or cloud.

Having passed through the first wave of cloud computing, businesses are now looking at how to optimise their cloud operations and get the best ‘bang for their buck’ related to their specific needs. This is happening across all industries and has led to organisations frequently splitting workloads across different cloud platforms and vendors, taking either a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud approach in what has become an extremely complicated world to navigate. According to Simon Walsh, COO of Dell-owned Virtustream, the route taken is usually triggered by a business problem – or what he calls “a compelling event” – and more often than not, the answer is hybrid.

A hybrid world

“Cloud is a way of doing stuff, it’s something you do not something you buy,” he explained. “Every single company will have a compelling event which forces a change of something.” He cited Jaguar Land Rover as an example, a Dell EMC customer that is currently focusing on updating its legacy data centre infrastructure in order to keep pace with a rapidly changing industry environment. This poses some interesting questions for CIOs...

NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, INC., a leading provider of service assurance, cybersecurity, and business intelligence solutions, today announced the industry's first products designed to extend service assurance that include broad application assurance, encompassing off-the-shelf or custom applications, running in physical or virtual data centers, or in the cloud.

"There has been a lack of solutions that provide the same visibility that exist in conventional data centers for cloud services," said Anil Singhal, president and chief executive officer, NETSCOUT. "The solution we are introducing today provides unmatched visibility into the hybrid cloud environment and ensures that our customers can migrate applications to the cloud with confidence."

The VMware vRealize Suite enables customers to manage and provision at scale -- compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments. The platform's comprehensive management capabilities for the SDDC and across multiple clouds help customers to address three common use cases -- intelligent operations, automated IT and DevOps-ready IT -- based on thousands of customer engagements.

"VMware is committed to supporting our customers' digital transformation initiatives by helping them to modernize their data centers as well as integrate their public clouds," said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. "These latest updates to our vRealize platform will help customers get more out of their hybrid cloud investments today, and put them on a path for cross-cloud management of applications and infrastructure regardless of where the workload is running."

Turbonomic today announced major advancements to its hybrid cloud management platform, enabling customers to confidently accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud. Turbonomic, recently named an IDC Innovator for multicloud management, has extended the platform's on-premises capabilities with new support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public cloud environments. Today's news underpins the Turbonomic vision of enabling organizations to control any workload, on any infrastructure, anywhere, anytime. New public cloud support includes:

Visibility of all workloads, whether on-premises or in AWS and Azure environments;

Acceleration of public cloud migration;

Lowering of public cloud bills on average by 30 percent;

Control of workloads to assure performance and deliver service levels; and

The FOSS acronym – standing for free, open source software – has been a clarion call for many since the open source movement started, despite being nominally based on a misinterpretation of what open source is all about. A group of people got together in 1998 to examine the “free software” market, out of concern that the concept was being hijacked and perverted in political and moral terms, prompting a push to create a more commercially oriented definition of what it has to offer.

This community also sought to reinforce the fact that the source code belongs to someone, and is their intellectual property. The key driver for using open source code is to avoid paying money to proprietary software suppliers, such as Microsoft and Oracle, with the FOSS community on hand to provide a high level of support in response to any problems that crop up...

Nutanix has announced an agreement with Leeds-based managed service provider, Firstnet Solutions, to offer customers a choice of flexible hybrid cloud services based on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

An established provider of managed services in the North of England, Firstnet Solutions recently formed a new entity, Firstnet Data Centres, which opened its first datacentre in Leeds. Aspiring to be the first dedicated Tier III datacentre in its region, it gives customers a choice of traditional co-location facilities alongside a new mix of managed hosting, virtual desktop and cloud services. These new services will be based entirely on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, chosen after exhaustive research and competitive analysis.

Datos IO, the application-centric data management company, today announced RecoverX 2.0, enabling organizations to be more agile, enhance productivity, and drive operational efficiency as they deploy their next-generation customer centric applications in the cloud and scale their traditional applications across hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Data Management Reinvented for a Multi-Cloud World

Since its inception, Datos IO has realized the importance of data as the only common denominator binding all clouds together. To enable success for customers in their journey towards cloud adoption, Datos IO brings to the table ground-breaking innovations:

Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that leading airline group International Airlines Group (IAG) is using Red Hat solutions as the basis of its hybrid cloud platform, serving as a foundational element of its digital transformation initiatives.

IAG has expanded its use of Red Hat Virtualization to provide the server infrastructure for provisioning new Group-wide services, helping IAG improve business continuity for mission workloads at scale while also delivering the necessary agility for the Group to improve existing services and quickly bring new business applications to market. As part of IAG’s plans to provide new cloud-based services, they have also selected Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat’s integrated solution for building and managing an open, private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, as the basis for its OpenStack-based cloud.

Cloud computing continues to grow at a steady pace across Europe. IDC predicts that the EMEA public cloud market will expand 26% over the next four years. Hybrid cloud is driving public cloud adoption and is the catalyst for much of European enterprises’ digital transformation. In fact, a CIO Research survey showed that over half of CIOs and IT managers in France, Germany and the UK identified hybrid cloud as the most common cloud adoption model.

What we have seen from customers in our 62 Equinix data centers across EMEA, and heard at conferences such as this year’s Cloud Computing Expo in Paris, is that the enterprise cloud ecosystem grows along with a CIO’s trust! The following factors are influencing greater “cloud confidence” and adoption in the region, specifically at the digital edge where there are higher concentrations of users, applications, data and clouds:...